


Offerings.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Jedi Apprentice Series - Jude Watson & Dave Wolverton, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Master & Padawan Relationship(s), Melida/Daan, Qui-Gon's love language is probably gift giving, selective mutism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-01-24 09:08:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21335737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: The last thing he had seen as he was lead out of the courtroom had been the hard line of Qui-Gon’s shoulders as he stood there in the front row.  His master had not turned around.It is the last image he sees before he falls asleep.
Relationships: Qui-Gon Jinn & Obi-Wan Kenobi
Comments: 48
Kudos: 521





	Offerings.

**Author's Note:**

> Much love and appreciation to LuvEwan for inspiring and betaing this fic!!! <3<3<3

He is not imprisoned. 

It is not a jail, he is not held captive. This world is far too civilized for that, though it contains a certain primitive grimness to it; stone promontories and pillars rising to touch the sky, gaping chasms in the bedrock. Obi-Wan, when he stops to consider it, finds that he is grateful. This is not a prison. Not this time, and that is a relief.

He is placed in a section of the Conservatory hardly used by the scholars here, in the oldest part of the edifice built up against the base of the nearest mountain. All the buildings here have been constructed from the same mountain rock. The walls of his room are made from this dark gray rock, with swirls of lighter gray and black winding across each chiseled block in wild patterns. There is a small window, overlooking the courtyard many stories below, and a door with no locks keeping him inside. 

It is not a prison. It is not a prison. 

He has a bed, for example, a low bed frame with a mattress made from the down plucked from the wild birds that nest in the stone alcoves. Clean sheets that become damp to the touch after several hours; water is always trickling out of the multitudes of springs that well up from beneath the rock. There is one spring bubbling up in a corner of his room, water falling from a recess in the walls into a rough basin etched out of the rock. This is a luxury, compared to even some places he has spent time willingly, where the tradeoff for constant warmth and sunlight is constantly shaking one’s canteen for last precious sips of water. There are no bars on the windows, simply a thin sheet of clear pane set crookedly in the grooves of the windowframe, easily pried apart with clever fingers and removed.

It is not a prison. 

He can come and go freely in the Conservatory, though he cannot leave. Much like the Temple, there are bells that order the days, and he follows their instructions blindly, more due to a lack of his own initiative than obedience to the rules of this place. There are bells for a morning meal, then to usher the scholars to their morning meditations in the courtyard. He is not told to attend or participate, but he does so regardless, uncomplaining. 

He does not know how long he will be here. He scarcely understands why he is here at all. He does not know if anyone will ever come for him, when his master might return.

A Jedi does not wait. 

His master would remind him to focus on the here and now. 

There are bells that ring for a midday and evening meal, as well, and to call the scholars to a nightly meditation, sparsely attended, in a quiet niche scraped out of the mountain, where the stonework floor is damp from the water that leaks up from just below the surface, where mosses and lichens grow rampant. 

His river stone had been taken from him when he was first brought to this place, along with his clothes and his lightsaber. He does not know what fate has fallen on his belongings, if they had been offered to his master after the trial. The damp stones draw his concentration out of his meditations; when Obi-Wan stands up from kneeling, the knees of his pants are darkened from the runoff of the spring.

It is difficult to meditate here, though it is a quiet, still place. Perhaps that is why he has such trouble. He finds more release in movement, to be the calm center inside a maelstrom of action swirling around him. Here, the stillness hangs heavy on him. 

After the last bell before dark, Obi-Wan returns to his room. He lies on the damp sheets of his bed and tries to sleep. The stillness that hangs over this place leaves him feeling exhausted, but his mind keeps clawing for purchase, seeking answers. 

He will toss and turn and he will play back his memories of the trial, if a trial was what that had been. Witnesses, testifying about the events of that last mission. The man in dark robes who had leaned over to say something quietly in Qui-Gon’s ear, and how Qui-Gon’s lips had pressed together grimly at what he had said. 

Over and over he replays these memories, trying to make sense of them. He uses the memory skills he had been taught as an initiate to recall events with heightened accuracy, trying to decipher the words. But no matter how many times he goes over them, he still cannot follow the words the man had said. He still cannot understand why Qui-Gon had allowed them to take him, why he had said nothing.

_ Where am I going? _ he had demanded of the guard escorting him out of the room. Underneath his skin he could feel his muscles shaking with adrenaline and fear. 

The guard had answered, _ To a holding place. _

_ For how long? _he had asked, but the guard had no answers.

The last thing he had seen as he was lead out of the courtroom had been the hard line of Qui-Gon’s shoulders as he stood there in the front row. His master had not turned around.

It is the last image he sees before he falls asleep.

\---

No one speaks to him here. They have offered him the courtesy of solitude, these scholars and their docents, and the children who stay here with them. It is not a prison, but, Obi-Wan has gathered, it is a holding cell for those have been removed from society. The people here keep to themselves, and study, and prepare for a day when they might return to their families, to the places where they might belong. 

There are books to read. He does not read them. There are lessons he may attend, but he has not sought them out. He stays in his room, or he does not. He sits on his bed and looks out the window.

There are vines that grow up the sides of the building here, delicate things that grow around the framework of his window and cast the light of his room with a greenish air, the leaves a pale green striped with silver and a dusky pink. After many weeks, the vines begin to blossom with soft pink and white flowers, tiny things no bigger than Obi-Wan’s thumbnail, with several dozen petals on each bud, and a pair of birds built a nest among the vines. 

He does not try to leave. For some time, he had told himself that he must stay where his master will know to find him, that Qui-Gon will come for him in time. Now what holds him in place is simple fact: There is nowhere else for him to go.

At first, he had opened himself to the Force and flung his fear and worry out as far as he could, hoping desperately for an answering touch, for some kind of reassurance, but each time he had felt nothing but an desolate chasm tossing his voice back to him and frightening him with its very emptiness. 

Sometimes he can almost feel something echoing back to him, a pebble tossed against a window. But though he listens and listens, he cannot tell if it is meant for him.

He no longer attempts to call out. He has not tried to touch the Force since then.

And still Qui-Gon does not come. 

\---

There are statuary in the courtyard, lining the walkways from building to building; the statues are tall, heavy things that turn their severe gazes down on those who walk underfoot between the pilasters and colonnades. Obi-Wan comes to the courtyard to watch the statues. He can breathe easier outside, though the air here is damp and cold as it is inside the Conservatory, and there is rarely a wind to bring in fresh air. 

He hides himself behind a pillar and leans back against the base of a statue and, sitting in that way, he will study these faces for hours. There are statues with heavy-lidded eyes, with cracked lips and missing ears, broken curls of hair. There is one statue in particular that he is drawn to, a towering figure of a man with eyes that look everywhere but at Obi-Wan. 

He traces the features of the statue until he could recite them from memory, the flat cheeks and the cracks webbing through its hands like veins, the lips pressed together in a line. The way the bare feet are crumbling into dust, how the left arm has broken off in times past, rendering the statue incomplete. 

Obi-Wan watches the statues until his own face stiffen with disuse. It is almost a familiar feeling now, ever since he had followed Qui-Gon off the transport from the city of Zehava and stepped foot back on Coruscant. He had stiffened his face against the initiates' fearful looks, against the other padawans’ distrustful glances. His mouth has forgotten how to turn up at the corners. He had not used his voice except to answer his master’s quiet questions, to affirm that he has followed Qui-Gon’s soft-spoken instructions to clear away the tea things, to attend his classes, to pack rations and supplies for another mission. 

Their quarters have been noiseless since his return. 

They will meditate side-by-side before their evening meal, and afterwards Obi-Wan will remain at the table to complete his assignments, the tap of his stylus against his datapad screen the loudest noise in the room until Qui-Gon breaks the stillness to ask him about his work. 

_ Fine, _ Obi-Wan will say, and even that will be too loud a sound, disturbing the fragile peace they have maintained since Melida/Daan, because sometimes Qui-Gon tries to keep talking, asking questions Obi-Wan has no answers for. 

_ You were not to blame _, Qui-Gon tells him one night. His master does not look at him, he simply speaks towards the place where he knows his student to be. Obi-Wan stiffens up, silence clicking in his ears. He will hear the blaster on the roof as it goes off, the quiet huff Cerasi had let out as the blast made an impact. 

_ Her death was not your fault, Obi-Wan _, Qui-Gon repeats, and he puts his hand across the table.

He has no words to offer his master. So he will jerk his shoulders up and down in an approximation of a shrug and ask to finish his work in his room. 

And sometimes Qui-Gon will sigh and rub his hand across his eyes as though he is very tired, and he will tell Obi-Wan to go to bed and get some rest. 

He can hear Qui-Gon’s hushed steps still moving in the rooms outside, his master’s quiet pacing as he moves chairs and puts away dishes. His footsteps hesitating just outside Obi-Wan’s room, as though he is waiting for an invitation, or thinking of something to say. And after some time, Obi-Wan will hear him moving away.

There is so much he still does not understand. The things that came before, all that came after. He could spend years in silent meditation over it all and still have no answers.

Obi-Wan tilts his head back against the pedestal of the statue and lets another day slip by.

\---

One day, he wakes up and there is a rock on his windowsill. 

He does not notice at first. Things move so slowly here that he simply does not expect any change, even though change is happening. It is only after he realizes that the unconscious pattern of his narrow world has been altered that he thinks to look for what is different. An appalling lack of awareness for a Jedi, he knows.

The difference is the arrival of a small, flat stone, of a kind that might be found on any world, moss-green rock with a hole bored though the middle, damp from sitting on the window ledge all night. A curiosity. He slips it in the pocket of his tunic and feels its weight as he walks to the morning meal. He holds the rock in his hand when it is time to meditate. It is new and strange, and therefore interesting. But when he closes his eyes and wraps his fingers around the rock, he is remembering a familiar warm voice murmuring, _Focus,_ _padawan._

He shoves the rock in his pocket as deep as it will go, and pushes the memories away.

But the weight of the stone in his pocket is heavy throughout the day, through the evening meal and the nightly meditations. He puts his hand in his pocket regularly to check for its presence. Still there. And that night, he turns it over in his hands until he falls asleep.

\---

The other boys receive notes, sometimes holocalls over the net. They are called out of their classes by name, and they go to one of the rooms in the newer parts of the Conservatory to take their calls. Others have little scraps of flimsi or heavy vellum envelopes slipped under their doors in the late afternoon by the scholar with a pot-belly and the fringe of hair around his ears, messages from relatives and friends. 

For the first several weeks of his stay, Obi-Wan had expected - well, he had not known what to expect. But he waited, and waited, and watched the scholar making his rounds, feeling as weightless as a feather floating in the current of the wind, thinking _ Any day now. Any day. _

Days have passed and transformed into cycles.

His master would have told him that this is an exercise in patience, as all things are, so Obi-Wan examines his heart and looks at the secret hopes that grow up stubbornly, clinging to his heart like the vines that grow around his window, anticipation that makes him dizzy with longing. 

He acknowledges his hope - he releases it - he allows patience to weigh him down. 

\---

The birds that nest in his window bring back gifts for each other. Bits of string, small heating coils picked out of a scrap metal bin, scraps of a woven fabric faded a soft blue, all tucked inside the small nest built of twigs and the long, feathery green needles from the apice trees that grow up the sides of the mountains.

The birds’ collection reminds him of his master, always bending to pick up a leaf or a bit of sea-glass, bringing his tokens back to their quarters and scattering them throughout their rooms. Hanging a string of colorful beads in the window of their common area, tucking mugs carved out of aromatic woods from Chandrila and Tikkala in the cabinets of their kitchenette. How Qui-Gon would pass him these tokens as well, saying _ I’d thought you’d like this _ with a low chuckle _ . _

Sometimes at his meditation pillow, Qui-Gon will leave a green curling leaf, the unfurling frond of a fern. _ I thought of you, _ says Qui-Gon. _ It looked like you somehow. _Sometimes there is a datapad waiting for him on his bed, with a data crystal filled with texts to read. 

When he had followed Qui-Gon back inside their quarters for the first time since Melida/Daan, it had been the lack of change that had surprised him the most. How everything was still in its place: the cups in the cabinets and the trinkets on the shelves, Qui-Gon’s plants neatly arranged on the window. Somehow he had felt it should look different. There ought to be items out of place, an air of disarray, some indication of how his world has slipped sideways and turned upside down to match his own lurching stomach and tight throat.

But the only thing out of place was a dried leaf on his pillow. How long it had been there, Obi-Wan could not tell, perhaps fallen off one of the plants in the weeks and months he had been gone. Perhaps placed there even longer than that, before their assignment to Melida/Daan. 

It was not until much later that he came to understand that the only thing out of place in his master’s quarters was him, the padawan who had left and come back.

\---

One day there is an ochre-colored rock, round in shape with jagged edges like a sunburst, slipped through the tangled mess of vines that covers his windows. 

The birds, he realizes dully, only birds with their insatiable curiosity, collecting trinkets and bits of shiny things, hiding their treasures in secret spots. Nothing remarkable. Hardly meaningful. 

He fetches it out from the windowsill anyway. When he curls his fingers around the ochre rock, it is warm to the touch, a pulse of heat against his palm. It is the first warmth he has felt in this place.

And yet, as he holds the ochre-colored rock, he is thinking of how his master had once caught sight of his frost-bitten hands on a world caught in the grasp of a winter they were most unprepared for. His skin had turned raw and red from exposure, his knuckles had blistered and cracked on that mission: No matter how often he slathered salve on his fingers, the skin would crack apart and begin to bleed the next morning.

His master, looking down at his apprentice with faint surprise. How once Qui-Gon had noticed, he had taken his hands and rubbed them briskly between his own, how the sudden warmth had hurt worse at first than the numbing coldness. How he had jerked his hands away, not thinking, ashamed. 

_ Thank you, master, _ he had said with polite formality, to cover his embarrassment, and his master had accepted his words with a single nod.

\---

The trees that grow in these mountains are apice hardwoods, the lone thing smelling fresh and fragrant in the Conservatory, standing out amid the damp, mossy scent of mountain water and the living, breathing smell of stone. Water runs down the apice trees, collecting in the resin on the wood, and forming clear bubbles that harden over years into beads. 

Obi-Wan has spent hours studying the apice beads, how hundreds of water-beads hung off the branches of the trees like icicles, each one the shape of a drop of water, each one brighter than polished glass. He had thought of his master the first time he had carefully picked an apice bead from the tip of a branch and rolled it gently in his palm, feeling the bead’s smooth hardness. 

_ Qui-Gon would like this, _ he had thought, and the bead had made its way into his pocket before he remembered that looking ahead is another kind of hope. 

\----

His days are all the same, it is hard to distinguish the time that passes except by the small differences. Like the fog-drenched morning he goes to his familiar spot at the foot of the towering statue, and there is something small and glittering on the base of the pedestal: A bit of clear crystal, a piece of mountain quartz. He remembers seeing bits of this quartz before, in the rocky areas of the sacred pools he had visited on their trip to Silexara months and months ago.

Days and days pass by, and he almost forgets that there was anything different about them. He does not expect anything from his days, and so he is not disappointed when there are no changes. 

And then there is another token, slipped under his door one evening, waiting for him when he returns to his room: A plain brown feather, marked with black and gray speckles. 

Obi-Wan picks the gift off the floor. It is a gift, what else could it be? Slipped under his door, meant for him. A faint sense of anticipation prickles the back of his neck. He shakes it off quickly.

He is not waiting.

Obi-Wan brushes the feather against the back of his hand as he lies in his bed and waits for sleep to visit him.

A faraway memory comes to him, from the first days of his apprenticeship: A landing platform on a mining world, winds that whipped across the flat gray duracrete surface so fiercely that the hood of his cloak had been knocked backwards when he turned his face into the wind. Stopping to glance backwards at the world they were leaving behind, at the blood-red sun dipping below the horizon line, and feeling suddenly as though he might be the last person remaining on this empty, desolate world. 

Then he had turned, the wind shoving at his back, and there was Qui-Gon, all the way across the platform, his hands by his side, his mouth moving silently as the wind snatched his words away. Obi-Wan had thought his master might be speaking to him, calling for his wayward apprentice, so Obi-Wan had run to catch up, hoping to get in earshot in time to hear Qui-Gon calling out his name. 

\---

He keeps an eye on his window at night, willing his body to stay awake as long as he can, to see if he can tell the moment another rock appears at his windowsill. 

He is not waiting, he tells himself, even after long nights pass and the days stay the same. 

_ He will not come, _ Obi-Wan tells himself, because it is better to accept the truth of his circumstances than to cling to false hopes, and he feels almost at peace for the first time since he had been brought to this place. 

_ I will not wait, _ he tells himself. He had learned that lesson on Melida/Daan, nights and days passing in a blur after Cerasi’s green eyes closed forever, dreaming that one day he would look up and a ship would appear in the sky, and his master would walk forward to meet him, that he would have come for Obi-Wan without having to be asked. 

What is more unbearable, he wonders. The hope for something that may never happen, or the acceptance, when it finally comes?

He dreams of Qui-Gon once, his master walking with long strides, his watchful gaze on the horizon, and Obi-Wan almost running to keep up with the figure always moving just beyond him. He would have liked to put his hand out and catch a corner of his master’s robe, but Qui-Gon is already out of reach.

\---

There is a morning when a docent comes to find him under the statue where he is sitting. The weight of the rocks is heavy in his pocket, the feather an imperceptible weight tucked under his belt. 

“Come,” she says. They are the first words anyone has spoken to him since he was brought here. 

He follows her, his pocket jostling as he takes long steps to keep up with the docent’s quick strides.

He is brought outside to the courtyard. There is a man waiting underneath the arched entrance, as gray and distant as anything else on this world. He almost does not recognize the man standing there at first, but then he turns, and Obi-Wan can see the line of his shoulders. It is Qui-Gon.

\---

His master could be one of the statues here. Qui-Gon’s face is motionless, but when he sees Obi-Wan, he holds out a hand, palm up. Beckoning. Almost like he expects Obi-Wan to come running to him.

Obi-Wan walks to him slowly. He feels stupid, uncomprehending. He does not understand any of this, the long cycles waiting in this not-prision, this sudden release. Silence from Qui-gon, all this time. 

“Master,” he says. 

“Obi-Wan,” his master answers, and a rare thing happens. His master is almost smiling. 

Obi-Wan is finding it difficult to find anything to say. He has gotten used to silence, and now sound has become a strange intrusion. Qui-Gon has always been a calm pool of water in the Force, but now even his quiet, pleased presence is jarring. How long has he been in this place, after all? 

“Why are you here?” Obi-Wan asks. His words feel too abrupt, too blunt. He has forgotten how to speak conversationally. He should have greeted his master, thanked him for coming.

The almost-smile slips off of Qui-Gon’s face. He can see Qui-Gon’s expression shift to a muted bewilderment. “Padawan, I’m here for you.”

“I can leave, now, with you?”

“Yes,” Qui-Gon says. “Do you need to fetch your things?”

Obi-Wan shrugs. “I don’t have anything to take.”

Qui-Gon’s hand raises again and hovers near his shoulder, a gesture meant to move him. Obi-Wan obliges by beginning to walk obediently. Somehow it is easier to look down at his boots rather than at Qui-Gon. With each step he kicks up bits of moss and dirt and sends pebbles scattering in all directions. 

Qui-Gon directs him with a quiet word and the brush of his hand to a hidden corner of the courtyard, away from the walkways where scholars and docents are moving from building to building, until they are sequestered out of sight. 

His pulse is pounding in his temples, the beginnings of a headache. This sudden change is too much, overwhelming after all his stillness. He stares down at the pale blue lichen that covers the exposed rock outcroppings. 

“I have missed you,” Qui-Gon says. “I am grateful to have you back.”

A choking feeling, in his throat. “You couldn’t have missed me,” he says. “There was nothing from you. Just— silence.” 

The hand drops away from his shoulder. “I thought you would understand,” Qui-Gon says slowly, “that I was coming for you. I thought you would be expecting me.”

“Why would I be expecting you?”

“The— gifts,” says Qui-Gon, “on your window. And other places. I left them there, for you to find.”

The pounding in his head is increasing. He puts a hand out on the base of a nearby statue for balance. “You? You did that?”

“I was not allowed to write to you, to send you messages of any sort,” Qui-Gon says carefully. “But I could come and visit, to watch you and monitor your wellbeing. And I could leave you things, from me to you, so you would know that I was thinking of you. That I was trying to see you.”

He looks up at Qui-Gon at that. “You were?”

Qui-Gon is looking down at him with a frozen expression on his face. It looks familiar somehow, but Obi-Wan does not know where he has seen it before. The statuary in the courtyard, perhaps. It's that same kind of distant incomprehension. Qui-Gon says stiffly, “You did not understand.” 

“I did not know what to think,” he says. “You did not want me to be taken here. But you did not come back.” 

Underneath his frozen expression, Qui-Gon seems almost hurt. It is another thing Obi-Wan does not understand. He quickly looks back down at the ground.

It would be easier to take refuge in silence. But Qui-Gon perhaps deserves the politeness of an explanation. “I have found that it is easier, when you aren’t waiting for something to happen. When it might not. I thought perhaps it was more Jedi to not be waiting for you.”

“Oh, child,” sighs Qui-Gon. He sounds, suddenly, unspeakably weary. “Did you think I would not return for you?” he asks. “That I had left you behind?”

“You did once,” Obi-Wan answers. “It was my own fault then. I thought it might be my fault this time too.”

His master slowly drops to his knees there, in front of Obi-Wan. This close, Obi-Wan cannot help but look at him, even though he would rather not. The lines in the corners of his master’s eyes might have been etched out of stone.

“It was not your fault then,” says Qui-Gon, “and it was not your fault now. Obi-Wan, I never thought you would think that.” 

He shakes his head. He does not know why he must might fight this. “It must have been my fault,” he says, slow and stubborn, “it must have been, because...” The alternative is unacceptable. It implies that Qui-Gon might have made a mistake. 

Qui-Gon stands up and walks a few steps away, his back towards Obi-Wan. He passes his hand over his eyes, once, then again. And the hard line of Qui-Gon’s shoulders cracks and crumbles into dust like a statue falling to the ground. 

He watches as Qui-Gon’s shoulders shake silently. Obi-Wan thinks suddenly, _ Is he _\- But when Qui-Gon turns back around, his face is composed.

“You do not trust me.”

“I do trust you,” Obi-Wan protests uneasily.

“You do not,” says Qui-Gon. “And I can hardly fault you for that. It was not so long ago that I left you on a world destroyed by war. That decision could have cost you your life. You had no reason to trust that I would not do that again."

“You did what you had to do.”

“It was a grave failing on my part,” Qui-Gon says. “As Jedi, our lives are dangerous. But I have placed you in needlessly deadly situations. Which our last mission proved yet again. This trial was not about you, Obi-Wan, not about what you did or didn’t do. I was at fault. And I wanted to protect you from that.

“Obi-Wan, I never left. I stayed on this world, close to you. I watched you, made sure you were taken care of. I left you tokens- I thought you would understand. I had not stopped to consider how not knowing might hurt you.” 

“I should have understood,” Obi-Wan says. “I wasn’t thinking. Just feeling.” It had not felt like he was feeling anything his whole time. He had simply felt empty, flat like the line of a horizon with nothing approaching. But as he says the words, they become true; he is overwhelmed with an aching grief that leaves his arms and legs trembling, quite unable to stop. Or maybe he had been feeling this way all along, and he simply had not allowed himself to notice. He wraps his arms around his stomach. 

“I could feel your unhappiness. I tried to call to you through the Force,” Qui-Gon says. “But I could not find you. That worried me, padawan. I was so very afraid for you, what this trial might do to you. You— you fold into yourself so. And I do not know how to reach you.”

Obi-Wan thinks back over their last few, stilted months together: Qui-Gon, trying in his own quiet way to draw him out, and Obi-Wan, not recognizing it at all, politely and firmly shutting him down each time. Obi-Wan must have hurt him terribly, with that stilted politeness. 

Qui-Gon’s efforts to mend their breech have gone past Obi-Wan, unnoticed. He has been so locked in emptiness that he could not even feel Qui-Gon trying to reach for him.

He takes a stumbling step towards Qui-Gon and puts his arms around his waist. He buries his face in Qui-Gon's chest, and slowly his master raises his arms and holds him. After a moment, he feels Qui-Gon's chin come down to rest on the crown on his head. They stay that way until Obi-Wan is no longer trembling.

Qui-Gon’s hand remains on his shoulder even after Obi-Wan lets go. “Let's go home,” is all he says.

“I’m ready,” Obi-Wan replies. His pocket jostles against his leg with each step as they walk away.

\---

As their transport pulls away, Obi-Wan watches the mountains fade in the distance until they are indistinguishable from the line of the horizon. When he turns his face away, his master is standing very near, the folds of his cloak close enough to touch.

He takes the apice bead out of his pocket and presses it in Qui-Gon’s hand. “It reminded me of you,” he says, and Qui-Gon throws back his head and starts to laugh.

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Some say geodes are made from pockets of tears  
Trapped away in small places for years upon years  
Pressed down and transformed, 'til the true self was born  
And the whole world moved on like the last notes of a song  
A love letter sent without return address.
> 
> -"Geodes," Carrie Newcomer


End file.
